Software container solutions have revolutionized application development
approaches by enabling lightweight platform abstractions within the so-called
"containers." Several solutions are being actively developed in attempts to
bring the benefits of containers to high-performance computing systems with
their stringent security demands on the one hand and fundamental resource
sharing requirements on the other.
In this paper, we discuss the benefits and short-comings of such solutions
when deployed on real HPC systems and applied to production scientific
applications.We highlight use cases that are either enabled by or significantly
benefit from such solutions. We discuss the efforts by HPC system
administrators and support staff to support users of these type of workloads on
HPC systems not initially designed with these workloads in mind focusing on
NCSA's Blue Waters system.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures, in PEARC '18: Proceedings of Practice and
Experience in Advanced Research Computing, July 22--26, 2018, Pittsburgh, PA,
US